The astronauts waited tensely in the spacecraft as launch control figured out how to back out of a countdown with a fully fueled and armed rocket. If they had, their vehicle would have toppled back on the pad, producing a catastrophic explosion. But he knew from his Mercury-Atlas launch in October 1962 that they had not lifted off. Schirra should have pulled the D-ring between his legs and ejected the two from the spacecraft, an extremely dangerous procedure. In the cockpit, the mission clock started running and the abort alarm went off.
AGENA SPACECRAFT TV
The countdown went to zero, the engines started, and after a second or two, cut off-something I remember vividly from live TV at my parents’ house in Calgary, Alberta. Only eight days later, on Sunday morning, December 12, Schirra and Stafford again sat on their backs in the ejection seats, awaiting launch. Working long hours, pad crews cleaned up the launch damage and re-erected the other vehicle. The Gemini VII spacecraft was the heaviest ever launched, a bit over 3,636 kg (8,000 lbs.), in part because of the extra food and water supply, and in part because the capsule was retrofitted for a transponder to return the radar signal from VI-A. On December 4, Borman and Lovell were hurled into orbit by their modified Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile. Image: Dane Penland, Smithsonian, SI 2002-591 Gemini VII capsule on display in the Museum. Why not launch Gemini VII first, then clean up the launch pad and send VI, now called VI-A by NASA for its changed mission, to rendezvous with it? That would require a change in the test protocol, by taking down Schirra and Stafford’s Gemini-Titan and putting it in protected storage, then hurriedly building it up again after VII’s launch. Stafford’s fellow Group 2 astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were scheduled to endure a two-week medical mission, proving that humans could survive the longest possible Apollo mission to the Moon. Gemini VII was to be next in early December. But then Walter Burke and John Yardley of Gemini spacecraft contractor McDonnell Aircraft remembered an idea earlier floated by Titan II booster contractor Martin: launch two Geminis in quick succession. This failure could set the program back months. But the unpiloted Agena spacecraft blew up during launch that morning, stranding the crew waiting in their vehicle on Launch Complex 19. Gemini VI, commanded by Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra and piloted by Tom Stafford, was supposed to have orbited on October 25, to rendezvous and dock with an Agena target vehicle. Fifty years ago, on December 15, 1965, Gemini VI and VII met for the first rendezvous in space.
0 kommentar(er)
